


My Son's Favorite Pokémon

by ckret2



Category: POKÉMON Detective Pikachu (2019), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Estrangement, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 09:47:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: “He’s going to be over the moon when he receives you,” Harry told the newly-adopted Pikachu sitting on his lap. “You’re my son’s favorite Pokémon. HelovesPikachu."Harry adopts a Pikachu to give his estranged son for his thirteenth birthday.





	My Son's Favorite Pokémon

**Author's Note:**

> * _casually spends the whole fic dodging the fact that we don’t know the name of Tim’s mom or grandma_ *
> 
> Inspired by [this post](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/184816613532/ohrinkytinkytinky-lunadove-i-am-convinced), which [@dialovers](https://dialovers.tumblr.com/) linked to me.
> 
> Warning: Proofing is for people who aren’t riding on the high of posting fic for a movie that’s been out less than a week.

"He's going to be over the moon when he receives you," Harry told the newly-adopted Pikachu sitting on his lap. "You're my son's favorite Pokémon. He _loves_  Pikachu. When he was a kid—a younger kid, I mean—he used to make up fantasy dream teams—you know, wild things, with crazy rare mythical Pokémon—half of his dream teams had Palkia, and one of the lake guardians to calm it  _just in case they ran into Dialga_ , heh—that's Tim. Big dreamer and smart as a whip."

For a moment, the bubbling excitement in Harry's chest abated. He had no doubt that Tim was as sharp as he'd ever been—no doubt, even smarter now—but was he still the excited little dreamer Harry remembered? Harry's mother-in-law said Tim was still making good—well, okay—grades in school, he wasn't getting in any trouble; but he kept so quiet these days, she had no idea what was going on in his head. He hadn't talked about the League in over a year.

Harry pulled himself from his worries. "Anyway," he said, and the Pikachu turned its gaze away from the bus window back to Harry's face. "Every single team he dreamed up— _every one_ —had a Pikachu on it. He's _always_  wanted to have a Pikachu."

The Pikachu smiled up at him, and Harry wasn't sure if it understood what he was saying or if it was just happy to hear its own name so many times. The shelter he'd picked up the Pikachu from didn't know anything about its training history—it came in a little roughed up, but no more or less than would be expected of a typical wild Pokémon _or_  a Pokémon that had recently been in a battle directed by a trainer and hadn't had time to heal—and they had no idea how much human language it had learned to understand, if any. But that was okay. It was well-behaved, it was socialized around humans, and it didn't have any problems with unprompted shocking. Tim could teach it the rest in time.

Harry felt his excitement growing again. Tim's thirteenth birthday was two days away, and according to his grandmother, he still hadn't gotten his first Pokémon. Harry couldn't wait to see Tim's face when his dad showed up with a Pikachu just for him. He remembered how Tim used to smile when trainers passed through with theirs, or when he was clinging to the chain link fence surrounding the patchy dirt battlefield at the neighborhood playground to watch kids battling.

He couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd seen Tim smile. He didn't have much to smile about, in the year leading up to... And then Harry hadn't seen Tim _at all_  in over a year and a half, except in pictures his grandmother sent. He always looked so solemn.

If anything would make him smile, it would be a Pikachu.

The bus slowed, and Harry told the Pikachu, "This is our stop." He scooped his hands under it in preparation to carry it, but to his surprise the Pikachu nimbly climbed his arm, tugging and stretching the sleeve of his jacket, to settle on his shoulder. "Hey!" He reached up to pat the Pikachu. "You comfortable up there?"

It happily chirped, "Pi- _ka!_ "

As he stood, he saw a woman sitting across the bus aisle quickly drop her head, fighting back a smile. She'd probably heard him gushing about his son to the Pikachu. He felt a lot more conspicuous with a Pikachu on his shoulder—people kept looking at him and smiling. As if his good mood needed to be buoyed any more than it already was.

He couldn't wait to get up to his apartment to talk to Tim. He pulled out his phone, dialed, and put it between his ear and unoccupied shoulder while he searched through his massive mess of a keyring—lock box keys, PO box keys, several keys from old cases he thought might be needed again in the future, a dizzying array of keychain cards for the stores he frequented—looking for the lone little key to his mailbox. He wasn't going to _tell_  Tim about the Pikachu, but he could let him know he was coming to see him for his birthday. Maybe drop a couple of hints to get him excited.

The Pikachu leaned forward to peer at Harry's many keys, the mailbox door, the mail he took out of it. "You're a curious guy, aren'tcha?" He handed a piece of spam mail to Pikachu to see what it did with it, just as Tim picked up.

"Hello? Dad?"

"Hey, kid!" And suddenly, he didn't know what to say. It had been—how long?—almost three months since he'd last talked to Tim? He had to sound cheerful. He had to sound loving. He had to sound dadly. And that was _hard_ , because he _was_  cheerful, _and_  loving, _and_  a dad, but suddenly he didn't know how to act all those things at once for the benefit of a kid he hadn't seen in a year and a half and spoke to on a quarter-yearly basis— _was he being dad enough_? Did he sound fun and fatherly enough to compensate for three whole months of silence when he couldn't think of an excuse to call his own son? That was a lot of pressure to put on the first five seconds of a phone call. "How's—how's it going?"

"Fine."

He waited a moment to see if Tim was going to add anything else, until the silence was verging on awkward and he hurried on: "Did I catch you at a bad time? Are you busy?"

"No."

Okay. Monosyllabic. Yeah, that was fine, Tim was almost a teenager— _jeez_ , Tim was almost a _teenager_ —he was probably, probably picking up the uncommunicative teenager schtick. Harry glanced at the Pikachu to make sure it wasn't going to lose its balance as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. It was nibbling on the corner of the envelope he'd handed it. "Well, I—wanted to wish you a happy early birthday! The big 1-3. I can hardly believe it." He couldn't believe he'd missed the entire 1-2.

"Yeah. Thanks, dad."

He pulled out his keyring again, and started the laborious search for his apartment key. "And your grandma tells me you still don't have your own Pokémon, huh? Getting a little up there, aren't you? I thought you were gonna have a whole team by thirteen." Okay, it wasn't his most subtle segue—was it just him, or was it a lot easier to covertly interrogate suspects and interview witnesses than it was to pick his own kid's mind? Was that a problem other detective-dads had?

"Yeah, no, I—I don't want a Pokémon."

Harry dropped his keyring. "What?!"

"I changed my mind."

"You ch— But you _love_  Pokémon! You've always wanted to be a trainer."

"That's a kiddie dream, dad," he said, like two-days-from-thirteen-year-old Tim had vast wisdom far beyond that of mere eleven-year-old Tim. "It's basically _impossible_ to make a living as a trainer. _Especially_  in the League circuit."

"Yeah, but..." Harry looked down at his keys in dismay, as though their ungainly sprawling collapse to the floor were somehow representative of the progress of this conversation. "But some people do. You know, the really good ones." He half knelt to pick up his keyring; Pikachu jumped off his shoulder, grabbed it, and held it up for him. He held the mouthpiece of his cell phone out to whisper, "Thanks."

"Those are just statistical outliers. They skew the data. It makes it look like more people succeed than really do." Harry's mother-in-law had said that Tim was getting really into math these days. Tim's grades had dropped after his mother's death; by now, he was shakily passing in most of his classes, but recently he'd shot up to star student in math. He must have got that from his mother. Harry had to pay someone else to tell him how to do his taxes.

He finally got his door unlocked; Pikachu squeezed in the moment the door was open wide enough for it to squeeze through. "When did this change?"

"I dunno." Tim's tone was dull and defensive, like he resented having to tell his dad about changes in his interests. "It's not a big deal."

It was a big deal to Harry. It was the biggest shift in Tim's life since—well—since the last time Harry had seen him in person. "So... you don't want _any_  Pokémon? At _all_?" Harry looked down at the Pikachu. It was sniffing at the potted plant under the window. He hissed, " _Hey_! Fss fss! Fss!" and gestured for it to get away from the plant. He had no idea if the leaves were safe for a Pikachu.

He almost missed Tim saying, "No? Not really."

"Huh." For a moment, he wasn't sure what else to say. He considered, _Would a Pikachu change your mind?_  but was afraid it wouldn't and that his presumption would just embarrass them both. Tim said he didn't want a Pokémon, so...

In his mind, he could still picture the smile on Tim's face when Harry handed him a Pikachu.

He didn't have any other excuses to prolong the call. "Well... I guess I'll s— Do you want me to visit for your birthday?" He could already feel his stomach winding up and preparing to sink; he knew what the answer was going to be. He should have just _said_  he was going to show up. If he could still offer the Pikachu, he'd have had a reason to declare he was coming, instead of asking his own son for permission to see him.

But even though he was Tim's own father, he didn't feel like he had the right to demand to see him, even on his birthday— _especially_  on his birthday. If there was ever a time when he had the right to demand Tim's company, it had been right after he moved to Ryme City to find an apartment for them. When his mother-in-law had called to say Tim was refusing to come, _that_  was when he'd had a chance to veto a grieving eleven-year-old's decision and tell him he was coming anyway.

But he hadn't. He hadn't want to hurt Tim even more by making him move when he wasn't ready. He'd thought he'd get Tim to come later; but now, it felt impossible to ask. Like, in that moment, he'd somehow forfeited his right to be Tim's dad.

"No, that's okay," Tim said; and, right on cue, Harry felt the bottom of his stomach drop out. "You don't have to."

 _I want to_ , Harry wanted to say; but after a year and a half of being so careful not to push his son, he couldn't push now. "Okay. I'll—I'll call you, all right?"

"Sure."

"Happy birthday, kid."

"Thanks. Bye, dad."

"Bye." It wasn't until the exact second Tim hung up that Harry realized he hadn't said _I love you_.

With a sigh, he sank down on his couch, dropped his head into his hands, and ran his fingers through his hair. Pikachu tentatively padded on all fours between his feet to look up at his face. It was still holding its junk mail in its mouth. It had chewed off one side of the envelope. "Hey," he said wearily. "Change of plans." He wondered if he could return the Pikachu to the shelter, quickly decided that would be a pretty heartless thing to do, and said, "I guess you're gonna be staying with me a while instead."

"P—" It plopped down on its little yellow tush so it could take its envelope out of its mouth, looked up at Harry again, and said, "Chaaa!" A smile twitched at the corner of Harry's mouth.

The Pikachu ripped at the gash it had made in the envelope, noticed the colors of the decorative border on the paper inside, and pulled it out. It unfolded it, held it up, and examined it. For a moment, it looked like it was consulting a little Pikachu-sized folding map.

Harry huffed a laugh. "I'm not gonna be able to leave you in the apartment. Pikachu are really high energy, right?" That had been one of the reasons why he and his wife had decided not to get Tim a Pikachu when he was too young to be responsible for it—they would have ended up doing all the work to burn off its excess energy. "You're gonna make me really stick out when I'm on the job, though. Everyone looks at a Pikachu." He propped his chin in his hand, looking at the Pikachu consideringly. "Maybe if I got a hat to disguise you..."

Pikachu had lost interest in the spam, dropped it, and was now wandering over to the TV. It got up on its hind legs to sniff at the screen. Harry wondered if it could smell electricity.

Tim would know.

"What do you say? Wanna try out detective work?"

It twisted to smile at Harry over its shoulder. "Pika pi!"

**Author's Note:**

> Also available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/184818666797/my-sons-favorite-pokemon).


End file.
